Lowdown
By Jojo
Robles
Who
doesn’t want peace in Muslim Mindanao, now rechristened
“Bangsamoro” by virtue of a framework agreement signed yesterday
between the Philippine government and the Moro Islamic Liberation
Front, with the backing of Malaysia? But will peace truly follow now
that President Noynoy Aquino has imposed his own version of Muslim
autonomy in the region, or will the agreement eventually lead to the
creation of a separate state in Mindanao, like strife-torn Kosovo was
in the former Yugoslavia?
The
Kosovo template of ethnic tension leading to autonomy and,
eventually, bloody independence backed by foreign powers is not idle
speculation. The long-standing Balkan trouble spot of Kosovo, after
all, shares a war-ravaged history, ethnic differentiation and
international intervention with Muslim Mindanao.
In
Kosovo, the trouble began after Yugoslavia decided to give its
troubled province autonomy. When the pro-independence Kosovo
Liberation Army started attacking government forces, the Yugoslav
government fought back, eventually starting the 1998-1999 Kosovo War,
which was settled by the intervention of the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization and United Nations peacekeeping forces.
An
exodus of Kosovo residents fleeing the war—reminiscent of the
Muslim Filipino exodus to Malaysia —plagued Serbia and Montenegro.
Eventually, Kosovo declared independence, backed by the guns of both
NATO and the UN.
Kosovo
remains an international poster child of strife, despite the best
intentions and the firepower of the people who would want to see it
become a separate state. But perhaps eternal turmoil is what the big
powers want in Kosovo—and in the new Bangsamoro.
*
* *
If
the Aquino administration and its allies in the health sector truly
want to see the health of Filipinos improve, why don’t they ban
cigarettes and alcohol altogether? But they can’t do that because,
just as President Noynoy Aquino is, by his own admission, addicted to
nicotine, his government is a slave of the taxes that the so-called
“sin products” bring in.
This
“policy incoherence,” as the much-maligned Senator Ralph Recto
calls it, lies at the heart of the controversy to raise taxes on
alcohol and tobacco. And just as the government cannot live without
the expanded value-added tax that Recto once backed, it seems it
cannot let go of its addiction to sin taxes – despite its supposed
altruistic aim of improving every Filipino’s health.
Nowhere
is this government’s hypocrisy clearer than in its desire to price
cigarettes and liquor beyond the reach of the ordinary Filipino
consumer, to discourage the population from smoking and drinking. And
yet it wants to generate more revenues from the taxes imposed on the
sales of tobacco and alcohol products to fund healthcare programs.
“If
the social injury these products cause is greater than the taxes they
contribute, then government should stop asking money from those who
pack cigarettes and bottle alcohol and should instead tell them to
pack up and go,” said Recto in his sponsorship speech on the
proposal to increase excise taxes on sin products. Recto says he
actually agrees with the anti-tobacco groups that are now bashing him
for coming up an excise tax measure supposedly far weaker than what
they had demanded.
But
if the government truly wants to ban smoking and drinking, it has to
let go of its addiction to the taxes collected from alcohol and
tobacco companies. Only, if cigarettes and alcohol were suddenly made
illegal, Recto explained, the government would go into “fiscal
shock” like a nicotine or alcohol addict gone cold turkey.
The
Department of Finance claims it needs the additional P60 billion it
expects from imposing excise tax hikes of up to 1,000 percent on
cigarettes and distilled spirits to fund health care. But it does not
bother to explain how it came up with this fantastic figure, or
whether this revenue goal is actually attainable.
Recto
insists the P60-billion target is way below the different estimates
made by government tax experts themselves. In one revenue scenario,
the tax yield would actually be P23 billion, or only 38 percent of
the DOF goal.
The
senator, who chairs the ways and means committee, conducted several
hearings on the proposed excise tax hike. It heard the positions
presented by experts, stakeholders and government officials and other
affected sectors on the proposal.
But
anti-tobacco advocates want Recto to listen only to them and to
ignore all the other findings of the committee. They are now angry
and are branding Recto’s committee report as a sellout to Big
Tobacco after the senator came out with a proposal that balanced the
interests of all the sectors involved, including the government.
As
correctly pointed out by Recto, haphazardly and abruptly raising
tobacco taxes like anti-tobacco groups want is counterproductive.
They want a tax policy that would discourage smoking and alcohol
drinking, which requires a “careful calibration of rates,” and
not a radical measure that would lead to diminishing tax returns,
Recto points out.
And
this is what the government and its allies have either conveniently
forgotten or ignored totally in their futile, incoherent quest to
twist and mangle “sin” taxation into becoming both a health and a
revenue measure. As any smoker or alcoholic will tell you, you can’t
have it both ways—indulging in sin and not indulging at all.
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